Sensitivity to spacing changes in faces and nonface objects in preschool-aged children and adults |
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Authors: | Macchi Cassia Viola Turati Chiara Schwarzer Gudrun |
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Affiliation: | a Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano–Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy;b Department of Psychology, University of Giessen, 35390 Giessen, Germany |
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Abstract: | Sensitivity to variations in the spacing of features in faces and a class of nonface objects (i.e., frontal images of cars) was tested in 3- and 4-year-old children and adults using a delayed or simultaneous two-alternative forced choice matching-to-sample task. In the adults, detection of spacing information was robust against exemplar differences for faces but varied across exemplars for cars (Experiment 1A). The 4-year-olds performed above chance in both face and car discrimination even when differences in spacing were very small (within ±1.6 standard deviations [SDs]) and the task involved memory components (Experiment 1B), and the same was true for the 3-year-olds when tested with larger spacing changes (within ±2.5 SDs) in a task that posed no memory demands (Experiment 2). An advantage in the discrimination of faces over cars was found at 4 years of age, but only when spacing cues were made more readily available (within ±2.5 SDs). Results demonstrate that the ability to discriminate objects based on feature spacing (i.e., sensitivity to second-order information) is present at 3 years of age and becomes more pronounced for faces than cars by 4 years of age. |
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Keywords: | Faces Cars Discrimination Spacing changes Second-order relations Preschool-aged children Adults |
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